It’s not every day that an ode to liberty is waiting in your e-mail inbox, so kudos to JP for posting Oscar Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty” at Facebook’s “Libertarians for Arts, Music and Culture” page.  I have to confess that I’m not familiar with Wilde’s work, but I never thought of him as a defender of liberty before.

I don’t think “Sonnet to Liberty” is an outstanding poem, but it’s worth sharing because it recognizes that while free speech is a bulwark against tyranny, it’s also a messy melange of “dissonant cries.”  Even when they are ill-informed and you disagree with them in substance, these “cries” are still worth supporting in principle.

However, there must be better, or at least other, poems out there on the subject of liberty.  Perhaps TAC readers who are more literate than me can suggest a few….in the meantime, here is Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty.”

Sonnet to Liberty

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know, –
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother – Liberty!

For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved – and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.